The Old Colts Read Online Free Page A

waiters in song; Wilson Mizner, playwright and short storyist who would become, in time, screenwriter and resident wit in Hollywood; Val O’Farrell, private eye and “friend” of Peggy Hopkins Joyce; Jimmy Walker, attorney and New York State Senator who even then aspired to be mayor one day; Damon Runyon of the American; and George M. Cohan, whose Revue had just passed a hundred performances at the Astor. They were watching a flying wedge of waiters bounce some disorderly college boys into Sixth Avenue and talking about the Sailor White vs. Victor McLaglen fight, and when Bat was asked what he would say about it in his column tomorrow, he said he had advised McLaglen to forget fighting and stick to the stage.
    Just then he saw a tall man enter the place, the man in the slouch hat he had earlier encountered on 43rd Street outside the race room. Carrying the valise, the man approached the bar, pointed Bat out to a bartender, then was gone before Bat could get to the bar.
    “That tall guy,” Bat said to the bartender. “What’d he want?”
    “Asked me if that was you. I said it was.”
    “Know ‘im?”
    “Not him.”
    When he returned to the table the others were drinking coffee and chewing the fat of two subjects simultaneously: the Peck murder case in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and Wilson’s dawdling and inconsistent responses to Germany’s submarine warfare on neutral shipping. After a tortuous trial a doctor named Waite had that day been found guilty of poisoning the Pecks, his wife’s millionaire parents—a verdict O’Farrell had predicted—and that day, despite the torpedoing of the Cymric, the President had declared in a National Press Club speech that the U.S. should stay out of war in order to help Europe reinstate peace. The consensus at the table at that weary hour was that no one would ever really know whether or not Waite was guilty because the evidence was too complicated, and only events would tell whether or not Wilson was playing with all his marbles because the matter of neutral shipping in wartime was too complicated.
    “Damn near as complicated as poling hogs,” opined the Telegraph columnist.
    There was a loud pause. The other seven at the table looked into their cups and settled their butts in preparation for another masterpiece of Mastersonia.
    “What in hell is poling hogs?” asked Runyon, agreeable to being straight man.
    Bat lit a Spud. “Well, in the northwest corner of Arkansas—”
    “Hold it,” said Igoe. “Just where is the northwest corner of Arkansas?”
    “Well,” said Bat, “suppose you’re in the northwest corner of Oklahoma. To get to the northwest corner of Arkansas you go east till you smell it, then south till you step in it.”
    Hype nodded.
    “I’ll begin again,” said Bat. “In the northwest corner of Arkansas there’s a lot of acorn trees, and usually the boys in a family aren’t weaned until they are eighteen or twenty years old.”
    They reflected.
    “I don’t get it,” admitted O’Farrell, the ace detective. Jimmy Walker, attorney and state senator, drew on a stogie. “Now just a minute.” He addressed Bat like a witness. “Let’s separate these things, shall we? Why are the boys in northwest Arkansas not weaned until they are eighteen or twenty years old?”
    “Because the longer they’re on mother’s milk, the taller they grow, and the taller they grow, the more money they can earn.”
    They looked at each other, sinking ever deeper into the swamp, willing yet reluctant.
    “Goddammit, Georgie,” said Runyon to Cohan, “I will not play straight man all the damn time. It’s your turn.”
    George M. jumped out of his chair and leaned on its back. He was not a man who liked to sit when there was something going on, and something was. “All right, Bat,” he said on cue. “I have never played northwest Arkansas and never intend to, but how can the boys there earn more money the taller they grow?”
    “By poling hogs.”
    Bat smiled